I still find your complaint about "suddenly loosing contact" quite
moot.
If the person won't react in couple of months on request to confirm
his/her presence what makes you think such person would react on any
other mail sent to that address.

That person once was generous enough to significantly contribute to
openSUSE such that s/he was rewarded with the use of a forwarding
address with the @openSUSE.org domain name. That person may still be
generous enough to respond to a query about a contribution that is now
the subject of research. If they don't have that type of time, most
Mail User Agent software has the ability to filter to the SPAM bucket
anything arriving from a particular address. By the openSUSE project
supporting the forwarded address, we allow them to maintain a
relationship with openSUSE if THEY wish or cut off that relationship
if THEY wish. THEY may appreciate that respectful approach.

Most of the projects actually do the same if they retire somebody.

I'm OK with other projects doing as they choose. I'm just trying to
make sure the openSUSE project makes a decision based on all the
information available.

Think of it like company email. You get one while you "work" on the
thing and if you decide to move on the email changes. Or did any of
your former employers let you keep your email.

I separated out the following because it illustrates my point:

Or when I think of it
did your university let you keep your student email?

There are many higher level institutions of learning that routinely
convert a student's locally served email address to a forwarding
address maintained by the alum. They consider this an easy investment
in maintaining that student as part of the Alumni (read Donor)
community. All those that possess an @openSUSE.org forwarding address
were Donors once. Maybe they will be one again if we maintain a
respectful appreciation of their efforts.

Also we can be really really nice and actually keep the aliases on
autoreply that would say something like "Hello this guy is no longer
with us, last known email address is bla@xxxxxxxxxxx".

Which Michal has reminded us was one of his first proposals. I
recognize, however, this will require administrator hours and cpu
cycles, perhaps only a few of each, to maintain.

So now that the costs of cutting off a communication channel are
sufficiently visible, can we get a concurrence from the Infrastructure
maintenance personnel that it is not a major burden and the forwarding
addresses, at least, will never be discarded?
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